Worth It (Forbidden Men 6)

He squeezed his eyes closed and bowed his head as regret passed over his features. It was the most emotion he’d shown me in six years.

Hope flared inside me. This was it. Finally, he was going to open up to me and talk about...whatever was causing this inhuman behavior of his.

But, nope. False alarm. He turned away to head down the hall away from Pick’s apartment, saying something in his gravelly voice that sounded like, “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?” I demanded, utterly confused and dogging his steps. “Why can’t you just talk to me? What did I do to make you hate me? Why wouldn’t you even see me when I came to visit you in prison?”

He stopped in his tracks, and tipped his head to the side as if to put his ear toward me to hear better. “You came? To the prison?”

“Of course.” A tear slipped down my cheek, but I didn’t care about hiding it from him this time. “The first freaking chance I had. I was there the day I turned eighteen and was a legal adult.”

I’d finally been allowed visitation rights without parental consent. And the only thing I’d wanted for my birthday was to see his face. I would’ve been happy for only a few minutes as long as I could’ve gotten the chance to smile at him and tell him again that I still loved him. That I was still waiting for him.

It had broken my heart when the guard had turned me away.

A dark cloud passed over Knox’s face. “Your birthday? I wasn’t...” He flinched, but then continued. “I wasn’t allowed visitors that day.”

I opened my mouth to ask, but that haunted pallor on his face made me close my mouth, hoping he’d tell me.

He didn’t, of course.

Sighing, I decided maybe I needed to be the one to open up before he would. I had no idea what had happened to him to change him this much, but I was determined to find out.

So I laid all my cards on the table, face up. “I waited for you,” I confessed.

Slowly, he looked up, his brown eyes a little glossy and wet.

“I waited for you for four years with no word from you whatsoever. And I would’ve waited more...until two weeks before you were supposed to be released, I learned you’d killed two people. And one of them just happened to be the son of my father’s lawyer.”

He didn’t react at all. No regret, no anger, no explanation, no nothing.

I lifted my hands in frustrated defeat. “And suddenly those two weeks left to wait became thirty more years.” My voice broke. “I couldn’t wait thirty years, Knox.”

His eyes were sad when they shifted my way. “You shouldn’t have even waited four.”

I sniffed. “No, I guess I shouldn’t have. You kept us apart by killing him. You know that, right? When you showed me that your need for vengeance meant more to you than getting out to be with me, you slaughtered everything we could’ve had together. You are the one who kept us apart.” Shaking hard, I wrapped my arms around my chest, hugging myself. “I just hope it was worth it for you.”

The bastard remained mute. I’d just spewed stuff at him I didn’t even believe to get a reaction from him, but he merely stood there, a complete freaking stone with zero emotion.

I sniffed, unable to believe him. Frustrated, pissed, and heartbroken, I spun away and stormed down the apartment hall.

I made it around the corner and into the stairwell before I slid down onto the top step and bawled, burrowing my face into my hands as the misery consumed me.

The Knox I’d known would’ve found me. He wouldn’t have been able to handle my tears. He would’ve sat beside me, and talked to me, and hugged me until everything was okay again.

But the stranger I’d just walked away from stayed away.

So I cried even harder because it was finally hitting me that the boy I’d once loved was truly, horribly gone.

I hated the days she came late. Actually, I hated it when she couldn’t show at all. But those didn’t happen very often. Usually, her family paid her as much attention as my family paid me, and she could come out into the woods without anyone knowing or caring.

But I always stressed through every hour she didn’t show. What if she was hurt, or her family had found out, or she’d changed her mind and decided sneaking around with me wasn’t worth it after all? Then I got to thinking that it might be best if she did give up on me, because I started to imagine the future, and it didn’t just have me in it. I had to think about her. And a future with her in it looked sad, because I had no idea how to take care of her.

Before, the idea of just being a drifter and picking up any spare job I found would’ve been fine. Now, though, now I needed something secure, something permanent, something good enough to take care of both of us if I had to. No way in hell was I going to turn out like my dad and sponge off my woman, letting her break her back to bring in all the money and raise all the kids. I was going to be a man City could be proud to call hers.

Which only freaked me out more, because I had no idea how to become that person.

When I heard footsteps coming, jerking me from my panic, I jumped up, relieved. The dock swayed under me as I loped down the ramp to meet her on the shore.